During the beta I did find some "hidden areas" in the mining garage and the refinery base. they were in the side/back rooms of the bases. The tasks dont light up unless you finish some previous goal, apparently. so doing in the right order may be important.

During the beta I did find some "hidden areas" in the mining garage and the refinery base. they were in the side/back rooms of the bases. The tasks dont light up unless you finish some previous goal, apparently. so doing in the right order may be important.

-pressurization (the side office of the construction ship garage)

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I've got to start over. Somehow along the way, two unfinished tasks just disappeared (I know one was hydrogen thrusters, or something like that). I'll try again, but before I perform any task I'm going to go around and drop GPS waypoints at the visible locations so I don't lose any (hopefully).

Even though I've been playing SE for years I'm actually finding it quite enjoyable playing through this scenario. The biggest downside so far is it can be hard to track where some things are and I have no idea if I've found everything.

Some parts were excellent, but I kept wondering how much would be clear to a newcomer. The waypoints for tasks were particularly an issue: after I moved away from the initial platform, I could see waypoints in several directions, but some disappeared as I moved towards one. It would have been easy to miss that they were there at all, and a novice might not have known how to backtrack.

The tasks were easy enough, up until the combat; you'd get a few chances at that if you did the ship factory first and remembered you could make more. But it really takes a steep jump in difficulty with the pirate base on the planet. A novice might assume that the ship with the jump drive, which ran on batteries and had just a bit more charge than was needed to reach the planet, should be able to land. Of course it can't. You'd have to design and construct a ship and weapons to attack that base, with no prior experience of moving from 0 G to a planet with gravity and an atmosphere. That's a fair challenge for an experienced player, and would take a lot of hours of work. A novice would scarcely know where to begin, especially after they nearly certainly crashed their jump-capable ship.

I have no idea how it is meant to signify that a task has been done. The ones I appear to have 'completed' just seem to just stopped telling me what to do or go into some tips. That and the mining one on the first platform which has you refine some ore with the survival kit doesn't seem to work. Anyone know exactly what you have to do for this? Because i've put stone in it and taken ingots out of the thing (which it made from said stone) and not got it.

I've seen the planet, its really far away but idk about any waypoint to it. I would assume the leap you have to make isn't to make your own jump drive ship and go to it to see if anything is there.

{...} I guess when all question solutions given show up in green and some tips are given sometimes you're done with that one.

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Yes, the text turning green indicates you've completed a task.

I'd followed the series of tasks, like a trail of breadcrumbs, and eventually there was a cluster of three. One of them was marked "Task: hyperjump", and was associated with a beacon, "Mayday". That's a small ship, powered only by batteries, with a jump drive to repair. Once that's repaired, it tells you to look for an LCD with the coordinates of a hidden base. There is an LCD with coodinates, but you get the waypoint automatically. After you reach the "hidden base", you get a new task: to reach the planet, along with a waypoint. Get to less than 100 km from the planet, and you get a waypoint for the pirate base, the task to destroy the pirate base, and the Steam achievement, "Engineering Degree".

The Steam achievement suggests to me that reaching the planet should be regarded as the effective end of the tutorial, and it could have been made more clear within the game.

As it stands, you'd probably have reached the planet in the "Explorer Ship", which is powered by batteries, and you don't have enough charge to go back to all the little bases you left behind. You'd only have whatever materials you thought to pack in the small storage container. So if you were thinking ahead, you might have added a powerplant or solar panels. The tutorial had taught you to expect whatever resources you'd need were waiting at the next waypoint, and unless I'd missed something, there were normal asteroids around, but nothing else to help prepare an assault. For a novice, this was a dead end.

TBH, I tried cheating: the admin commands were enabled, so I could paste in ships and so forth. I may have broken the scripting, though, as I still couldn't complete that task.

Well, I'm not a total noob, but I haven't played the game for over a year. Actually I got as far as about the drone station and then I got distracted by the fact that the starter ship, the one you get at the start platform, doesn't work correctly.
At one point in the help tips I noticed it said the hydrogen electric generator has it's own tank, I wasn't aware of that, but the O2/H2 generator refuses to fill it. So, I started over and then checked if all placements of the O2/H2 generator, the hydrogen generator and the cargo container, that works as a link between the two, do connect properly and they seem to do so, but no dice. The Oxygen tank fills up fine, but the H2 tank in the generator stays empty. The generator is switched off of course, or it would consume all H2 generated faster then the tank could fill. There are not that many settings for the configuration for that hydrogen generator either, so I'm at a loss why this doesn't work as expected.
I wonder if others have noticed the same thing, or that it's just with my install.

I wonder if others have noticed the same thing, or that it's just with my install.

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Huh, I didn't run into that problem. In fact when I got to the lesson about ice mining, I loaded up the starter ship with ice, and it filled the H2 tank right up. That was going by the external lights, though; come to think of it, on the terminal, it still showed the tank as empty. As I understand it, the idea is that the hydrogen generator just runs long enough to recharge the batteries, and you're running off batteries most of the time.

(Of course, you're drawing on power to crack ice into O2 and H2, which are combined into H20, releasing the energy that you used to crack the molecules. But it's not a perpetual motion machine, because you use up the ice. It's goofy.)

Yes, I understand that the hydrogen generator is there for just topping up the batteries, but with a topped up ice storage in the O2/H2 generator it runs until Oxygen tank is 100% filled and then it stops. Only when I switch the hydrogen generator on it starts consuming that ice again at a very rapid pace. With a tank five times as big as the oxygen one it can't be filled in the same time and the oxygen tank is almost full at the start.

I'm not really sure what you mean by going by the external lights, but it seems to me there is a bug in here somewhere.

Well, I'm not a total noob, but I haven't played the game for over a year. Actually I got as far as about the drone station and then I got distracted by the fact that the starter ship, the one you get at the start platform, doesn't work correctly.
At one point in the help tips I noticed it said the hydrogen electric generator has it's own tank, I wasn't aware of that, but the O2/H2 generator refuses to fill it. So, I started over and then checked if all placements of the O2/H2 generator, the hydrogen generator and the cargo container, that works as a link between the two, do connect properly and they seem to do so, but no dice. The Oxygen tank fills up fine, but the H2 tank in the generator stays empty. The generator is switched off of course, or it would consume all H2 generated faster then the tank could fill. There are not that many settings for the configuration for that hydrogen generator either, so I'm at a loss why this doesn't work as expected.
I wonder if others have noticed the same thing, or that it's just with my install.

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I have run into the same issue with the hydrogen engine not filling itself from a connected supply. Each time I fixed it by relogging. (Single player game)

I spent Sunday replaying the "Learning to Survive" scenario, and actually managed to complete it, technically -- though that involved using admin commands to spawn in ships for the last challenges. Again, I'm impressed with a lot of aspects of it. But it reinforced my criticisms.

First, the task waypoints disappearing are a real problem. I'd played through most of the tutorial before, and knew what the tasks were, and roughly what direction they were in, from having been able to find them the first time. Despite that, and despite remembering it was tricky to find them, and making an effort to set waypoints in case I needed to backtrack, I still managed to miss three of the tasks. I had to find a list of GPS waypoints on Reddit to find them; backtracking wasn't enough. A novice player wouldn't even realize they'd missed anything.

Second, I can't emphasize enough that the final challenges are much, much harder than the game gives you reason to expect. Assuming you find the waypoints for all the tasks, all the initial tasks, aside from combat, are easy, and can be completed in an hour or so. The combat task is another level of challenge, likely to be quite difficult for a novice. But, destroying the pirate base, and then attacking Argentavis?

Assuming a novice player followed the tasks in the most obvious way, they're hanging over the planet, in an unarmed ship that is incapable of landing, that cannot even recharge itself. So the challenge for a novice:

Recognize that the ship will need to recharge, so before leaving, scavenge solar panels and attach them to the Explorer Ship.

On reaching the planet, recognize (without trying it) that operating in a gravity well will require more thrust than their little ship produces. If they recall the tip that hydrogen thrusters can be useful for leaving planets, they might infer that ion thrusters don't work as well for that, for some reason.

Much, much more likely: they try to fly towards the planet in the Explorer Ship, and find out the hard way that they don't have enough thrust and that ion thrusters don't work well in an atmosphere.

So, one way or another, they end up back at one of the minibases or the Starter Ship, and they have to work out how to build armed ships or drones that can operate in a gravity well and an atmosphere, and how to transport them to the planet.

Assuming they flew down to the planet themselves, they have to figure out how to fly back up.

And, they have to build a ship capable of taking on Argentavis. That's much less difficult than taking out the pirate base, but, it's no small task in itself.

I can't begin to estimate how long it would take a novice player to work out how to accomplish these tasks, but I think I'd spent at least a hundred hours or so in SE before I'd managed to design a ship that could travel from space to a planet, fly around in an atmosphere, fight, and return to space.

Presenting the player with very challenging tasks is fine, of course. The problem is that this appears to be an introductory tutorial. There should be a big, clear warning that you've completed the basic tutorial, that the final tasks are *very* challenging optional bonus challenges, so you'll want to come back after you've got some more experience with Space Engineers. Otherwise, you're basically just going to frustrate novices, many of whom will just give up and stop playing Space Engineers entirely.